Real Women Project
LARRY KIRKWOOD 2001
Larry Kirkwood (B.A. ’68) was a Kansas City artist known for taking hundreds of plaster-and-resin casts of people to celebrate the human form. He died in 2012.
This piece of Kirkwood's was part of the National Athena Foundation's "Real Women Project," which celebrated the diversity and beauty of women's bodies. It was displayed in the Sirridge Office of Medical Humanities' conference room for a number of years.
Spinning Tales from Surgery
2001
Marjorie Sirridge, M.D., is pictured here with her friend, Richard Selzer, M.D., a well-known surgeon who retired from medicine at the age of 58 to become a writer. Selzer published more than a dozen books, ranging from story and essay collections to novels. He once described his life as “blood and ink.” Selzer died in 2016. He was memorialized in the New York Times as “a doctor who delighted in the language of medicine as much as the practice of it.” “It is trust, not gratitude or worship, that animates the physician. To palm a fevered brow, to feel a thin wavering pulse at the wrist, to draw down a pale lower lid – these simple acts cause a doctor’s heart to expand… Add to this the possibility of the grace of healing, and there is no human contact more beautiful.”
– Richard Selzer, M.D., Down From Troy
In the 2001 issue of Human Factor, Sirridge honored Selzer for his many contributions to UMKC’s medical humanities program. Selzer was the first to give the William T. Sirridge, M.D., Medical Humanities Lecture at the School of Medicine in 1994 and returned several times to speak to students and participate in humanities classes.